Page 138 of Take Your Breath Away

Nan smiled. “Good, you’re catching on. What I’m trying to work out here, Tyler, is a defense strategy, and one part of that defense is being able to prove that you weren’t the only one with an opportunity to do Ms. DiCarlo harm. It looks to me that there’s as long as three-quarters of an hour that someone else could have entered that home and killed that woman.”

“You think?”

“Well, Tyler, if you didn’t do it—”

“I didn’t.”

She smiled. “Of course. What I’m going to be arguing is that there was plenty of time for someone else to get into that house and kill Ms. DiCarlo. And anything you can think of, anything you might have noticed, that might suggest someone else had been in the house will be very helpful to us.”

Tyler nodded slowly.

“Maybe … the sound of someone breathing, hiding in a closet. Or a squeak on the stairs. Someone clearing their throat really quietly. You get where I’m going here?”

Tyler nodded again. “I might … I might have heard something.”

“And when you heard this noise, you realized, instinctively, that the killer might still be in the house, which is why you didn’t call the police, and instead ran for your life.”

“I guess … I guess that’s what might have been what I was thinking.”

Nan smiled. “There you go. Let me make some more notes.”

Fifty-Eight

Andrew

I told Isabel I wanted to take her for a ride.

“I don’t want to see my sister’s grave,” she said. I had filled her in on most of what had happened to me in the afternoon. “I’m not ready for that. I’m not sure I can handle it.”

“Not there,” I said. “Someplace else.”

She shot me one wary look before we left. “What if this is a trick? What if I end up disappearing just like Brie?”

“Call or text anyone you want,” I said, “and tell them you’re with me. That should offer you some level of protection.”

She agreed to go. Once we were in my car, she had questions.

“If you know who hired this hit man,” Isabel said, “then why haven’t you gone straight to Detective Hardy?”

Both hands on the wheel, I glanced her way and smiled. “She and I have something of a strained relationship, which you should understand better than anyone. Anyway, before she slaps the cuffs on this person, I want a little face-to-face time. And when you’ve heard the truth, maybe you’ll finally be satisfied I didn’t have anything to do with Brie’s disappearance.”

Isabel looked increasingly uncomfortable. She was quiet for a moment, then said, “I’m going to kill Albert.” Her brother had tried to phone her twice in the last twenty minutes, and both times Isabel had declined the call. “What an idiot.”

“I suppose,” I said, trying to give her brother the benefit of the doubt, “that he thought he was doing the right thing.”

“You know what the road to hell is paved with,” she said.

“I do.”

“Even though I did everything I could to get Hardy to go after you,” she said, “I always held out some slim hope, you know? So when I saw that woman from the hospital window, pretending to be Brie, I wanted to believe. Didn’t you?”

I had to think about that. “If there had been a way for Brie to get in touch, to let me know she was okay, she would have done it directly. So I was skeptical. But Albert’s stunt accomplished more than he could have imagined. It might have given some false hope, but it also started off a panic.”

“You know, I was always jealous of her,” Isabel said. “Of Brie.”

I glanced over at her, then eyes back to the road.

“She was always the prettier one, the more popular one. I wanted to be that pretty, that popular. And then she ended up with you, and I guess I became even more envious.”